
For nearly a year, I’ve been hanging out on a Facebook “bankruptcy support” group. It’s a world full of misunderstanding, fear, and anguish. But it’s also clear to me that our profession can learn some things from that stew, both individually and collectively.
Represented, sorta
The thing that glares at me is the number of posters who are represented by attorneys, yet
have little or no understanding of either the law or the operation of their case. Nor do they have confidence in their attorney.
They try to fill that gap by soliciting advice from the web world at large, with all of the attendant risks. [I’m also struck by the number of contributors who blythely profer information that is flat-out wrong, but that’s another rant.]
The first question in my mind is whether posters are accurately reporting what their attorney said or did. We have no way of knowing that. But whether it was the attorney’s lack of attention to the issue at hand, or the client’s misunderstanding of the forces at play, Houston (or Atlanta or Boise) we have a problem.
Representation gone wrong
The problem is twofold, in my mind. One is the possibility of rank incomptence among the ranks of bankruptcy lawyers. The second is the failure of the competent to communicate effectively with their clients. Both contribute to a hostility to our profession and to underutilization of bankruptcy relief.
Striking is the repeated resistance of the FB crowd to choosing Chapter 13. Inaffordability coupled with the expectation that every scant improvement in income will be siphoned off for 5 years gives Chapter 13 a bad odor.
Communication as important as competence
I walk away with the conviction that some slice of the profession isn’t either interested or effective at delivering a basic understanding of bankruptcy to debtors.
It’s not only the debtor who must be transparent – we as lawyers must make bankruptcy law lucid. [Or as lucid as Congress and the courts allow.] Clients who don’t have a general idea of how this works fill in the blanks with assumptions and rank fear.
We owe our clients better.
The challenge, of course, is how to convey to layfolk enough about a specialized area of law that they can function in the bankruptcy world without being lawyers themselves. We don’t see our clients at their best, and stress doesn’t make most people sharper and more receptive to masses of information. So we have to work hard at communication.
The free consultation
I wonder to what extent the poor understanding of bankruptcy displayed by the FB posters is traceable to the free bankruptcy consultation.
Most of those free visits appear to be cursory engagements, too short to assess the situation and deliver much information to the client. Prospects walk away thinking that the above/below median is the only measure of Chapter 7 eligibility, or with an estimate of a Chapter 13 monthly payment that inflates as the case progresses, leaving the client feeling mislead.
And once the “sale” is made, delivering the overview slips from the attorney’s agenda.
Predictably, client difficulty in getting answers to questions looms large in the FB crew. Far too many posts begin: I’ve asked my lawyer but haven’t gotten a response.
While we as lawyers may recognize that the concern that drives a question isn’t pivotal, leaving the client unsure or unsatisfied serves no one.
Tools for communication
It’s in everyone’s interest to impart a working understanding of bankruptcy to those who are committing themselves to bankruptcy. Of course, it’s a mammoth task, when the law is foreign to most clients, dependent on facts we may not have at the moment, and important at a point in their lives when stress dims analytic capacity.
I try to utilize several channels of multisensory learning, chiefly visual and auditory input, to deliver information. I’m a writer, so I have created multiple one page handouts for clients on major topics for those who are visual learners, alongside two extensive websites ( www.bankruptcyinbrief.com and www.bankruptcysoapbox.com ) addressing both the overview and many nitty gritty topics.
I schedule initial consultations that are an hour long so I can deliver needed info in that conversation, for auditory learners. I invite subsequent questions by email, and respond to those promptly. I yearn for a
series of YouTube video’s for those who find them more accessible.
If you don’t write yourself, point cleints to reliable written sources. For auditory learners, find reliable video sources. (If you have such sources, please add them in the comments.)
It’s essential to be open and responsive to questions. At the beginning of the relationship, lay out the best way to ask questions of you and your staff.
The goal is to build client confidence in the relationship. Empower the client to walk away with good things to say about their lawyer and their experience.
Lawyer competence
The FB crew is undoubtedly an unscientific slice of the bankruptcy-curious. But if a healthy fraction of the posters who quote their lawyers for utterly inaccurate propositions are reliable reporters, we have a worrisome competence problem among those attorneys practicing bankruptcy.
With the acknowledgement that I’m preaching to the choir on this platform, as a profession we are all better off when the bar bands together to learn, share, and mentor. The generation that lived through the tsunami of change that came in 2005 and the intense education that followed is aging. We must nuture the next generation of consumer bankruptcy professionals.
Allowing the rancid stew of fear, misunderstanding and distain for lawyers visible in this FB group to persist does neither debtors nor the bankruptcy bar any good .